Diverging distribution of seedlings and mature trees reflects recent climate change in British Columbia

Analyzing the Effects of Temporal Resolution and Classification Confidence for Modeling Land Cover Change with Long Short-Term Memory Networks

“…Thus, the data is further processed to consider the province of British Columbia, Canada. Located in the Pacific Northwest region, the province features diverse ecosystems including coastal forests, sub-boreal forests, and alpine tundra [34,35]. Dense coniferous forests are the most prevalent vegetation cover found in British Columbia [35].…”

“…Located in the Pacific Northwest region, the province features diverse ecosystems including coastal forests, sub-boreal forests, and alpine tundra [34,35]. Dense coniferous forests are the most prevalent vegetation cover found in British Columbia [35]. First, using the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (v2.2.4), the desired 17-class LC data layer and respective classification confidence layer were obtained and combined to create a multidimensional mosaic dataset for each timestep [36].…”

“…The new aggregated class labels were named as per [42]. The aggregated "forest" class includes areas with forest cover greater than 60%, decided due to the predominant vegetation type in the province being coniferous trees [35]. Datasets were subsequently resampled to 1 km spatial resolution to reduce the computation time required.…”

Changes in beta diversity and species functional traits differ between saplings and mature trees in an old‐growth forest

“…Mathys et al. (2018) reasoned that the fate of tree seedlings at the edges of their distributional ranges should be more sensitive indicators of climate change than mature trees. Supporting this, in Québec, northward range shifts in saplings of 16 tree species were greater in saplings than mature tree life stages (Sittaro et al., 2017).…”

“…In this paper, we examine resurveyed trees around permanent grid points, 24 years apart, to determine changes in forest structure and composition in a remnant old‐growth forest tract in the Carolinian Zone of southern Ontario, Canada. Because trees are long‐lived and thus forests change very slowly over time, we conducted separate analyses of both mature individuals and saplings, since recent studies have demonstrated that juvenile life stages (saplings and seedlings) may more accurately reflect environmental change (Kribel, Kolman, & Ware, 2011; Mathys, Coops, Simard, Waring, & Aitken, 2018; Sittaro et al., 2017). Specifically, we ask: (a) Are changes in the abundance and composition of tree species over the last two decades related to size distributions of trees (e.g., mature vs. sapling cohorts)?…”